Microsoft sends flowers to IE6 funeral Microsoft sent flowers to last night's IE6 funeral, thanking the browser for "all the good times." The nine-year-old IE6 was laid to rest yesterday in Denver, Colorado, after suffering a "workplace injury" at the offices of a certain search giant in Mountain View, California. Mourners unable to attend were asked to send …
Designers do the pretty faffing in Photoshop, developers are the ones who build (or 'develop') templates and code. Oh and btw, if it made your life that much harder you're not very good at it.
My company are supporting IE6 as long as we see a significant number of users in our GA accounts using it. It's not up to us to tell them to upgrade, while YouTube et al have the influence to do so the same tactics won't work on a 'normal' sized website, trust me (you should see the bounce rate stats from when we tried it, and no they weren't clicking the upgrade links).
Oh and btw, denying IE6 users access, or a worse experience is a bit sadistic, http://about.digg.com/blog/much-ado-about-ie6
In short, web pros work in the market that exsits, if that includes IE6 then stop whining and get on with what you're paid for.
Since the issues that arise from IE6 are mostly cosmetic they should ONLY affect designers (HTML/CSS) the only time developers would be hit by them is if they're chucking together a rich client application and the AJAX or JavaScript falls over.
If you ask me, (X)HTML and CSS fall squarely into the "designer" remit - even JavaScript if it's just used for fluff - that's why they're WEB designers not GRAPHIC designers.
Feck M$ for sitting on their laurels so long with such an amazingly bad piece of software. When you figure the manhours people spent hacking around the ugliest major layout engine ever written (Swing close second) then you realize how much IE6 cost in not only continuing to hold the web back but in time people could have spent doing more productive things.
IE6 is over a decade old. Microsoft have released two operating systems and two versions of the browser since then.
Just because some IT Departments have not got around to upgrading their SOE or some vendors still tie their apps to an outdataed IE model really can't be Microsoft's fault.
Test and upgrade to IE8 and deploy it site wide. Sure, when IE7 was new and shiny there was an excuse but now with IE8 having been out for a while there's no excuse still to have IE6 running.
If you have a specific app that needs it try virtualization and something like Spoon to run it - http://spoon.net/Browsers
...and it was MS who sent a "humorous" bunch of flowers, as though the whole thing was some whimsical jape that they were in on, rather than being the stinking bag of moose balls that caused the whole thing in the first place with a decade of ineptness.
So. How about *you* RTFA, eh?
“Thanks for the good times IE6"
Yeah, IE6, thanks for all those fun awesome times spent trying to get websites which work perfectly on every other browser to work in your stinking rotten sorry-ass worthless rendering engine. It's not as if I was planning to do something *useful* with that time I'll never get back, you utter, utter bastard.
PS. Where's the grave site? I feel like dancing on it.
Couldn't agree more. I have to put up with it in my job, and know that there is still those who insist that we keep this going despite the increasing evidence of its failures but hold the controls. Despite all the mounting reasons why we should kill the damn thing, I still hear all the same reasons about "nothing else works across the board with all our applications" and "we can't control other browsers through group policy like we can with IE6" or reasons even more stupid than that and just wait for a Chinese-style hack to occur to finally galvanise said person into action, even to go to IE7 if nothing else will serve.
Yes, I view clouds with a great deal of distrust, and I still feel antipathy toward Microsoft in general but even so, if the product in question is faulty, has been proven to be faulty, and even the manufacturer says it is faulty, then why use it? It seems that the only thing keeping it alive are those few who hold the reigns (don't blame the rank and file IT folk in Gubbermint circles - they realised this a long time ago, but are powerless to act) but, for whatever silly reason, don't want to move.
If, as the article states, that 20% (that's one out of five) of web access is still via IE6, it ain't dead. How many people worldwide use the internet on a Windows based computer? Then one in five of them still use IE6? That's a LOT of people still. You can't say it's dead until MS start forcing IE7 via Windows Update, with no option to deny it. THEN you can start to cheer.
Terminator icon, because of the zombie look... because that's what IE 6 is!!!
I think you may find that many of those still using IE6 are doing so in corporate environments where the browser is part of some standard build that won't get changed until someone finds the necessary budget. In such environments, it is common for windows updates to be disabled for normal users, along with admin privileges.
The last time I checked, my bank said they still supported Netscape Navigator for Internet banking. And IE6, And nothing else. I took a deep breath and carried on with the Linux and Firefox.
I think it's arguable that software outfits should recognise the inevitable inertia, and extend the time between the releases while writing better code. While the government and corporate environments which seem to have locked themselves into IE6 should be mocked until they get a clue. Heck, they might be in breach of Schedule 1 to the Data Protection Act if they insist on IE6.
The new design and associated name indicate a complete reversal of policies a full 180 degree rotation in both iconography and design. Faithful users can however expect to rely on classic staples such as zero addon support, insecure design and complete integration with OS privelleged functions.
"It should be noted that Internet Explorer 6 continues to drive nearly 20 per cent of all web access from beyond the grave."
That's just the NHS ;)
They should make it a criminal offence to still use IE6. Punishable by immediate crushing of your pc and a lifetime ban on owning another one. Oh, and be required to sign the internet bastard offenders register.
There. Back to my padded cell.
Not when fucktard lazy stupid developers tie their applications to IE6 it's not.
We will continue to run XP (because it comes with IE6) because we have a number of proprietary softwares that NEED IE6. There are no options without major infrastructure changes, to use anything else. Don't blame me (or should I say, the current crop of "us") it was our predicessors who were equally brain-dead who made the decisions to lock us in like that.
Several years later, we don't have the budget nor the upper management justification to replace something put into place just before that.
We *are* slowly migrating data from these apps to newer apps, but this takes time and money. It will be some time before we see IE6 out.
But when that time comes, we'll be having a party.
Partly to make sure the door hits IE6's arse on its way out, and more to goodbye the applications that "need" IE6, which are also examples of schlock programming. (does it show?).
If you were coding websites to IE (6) instead of standards, blame yourself. If everyone had stuck with standards then MS would've had too much backlash to ignore if they didn't bring IE6 up to snuff long, long ago.
As much as you cater to someone, that much they will eat or waste.
As per Florence above, my work is on systems that have IE6 concreted into their foundations. Change will be slow, disruptive and highly expensive.
Highly expensive because the systems are UK government ones, and the prime contractor who does all the dev and maint is [scarey chords] EDS.
EDS must be loving this!
LOL, that's a revealing statement. Does it means that IE6 was a web browser not designed to browse the interwebs?
That may be true right now, IE6 is being kept because all those pesky intranet applications that do not work with any other browser. Ah, and also those big corporations whose desktops are still running Windows 2000 (yes, there are quite a few)
Note to self: next time an application vendor comes touting its web application thing, remind them that having to install a load of plugins, ActiveX bombs and runtimes does not qualify as a web application. It is a thick client application under a perverse disguise.
"Internet Explorer 8 is the modern browser for today’s online world!"
LOL.. Yeah I want to use the least standard compliant of the modern browsers (it is, it's less compliant than firefox, konqueror, opera, chrome, or Safari.)
"Does it means that IE6 was a web browser not designed to browse the interwebs?"
To some extent yes. Microsoft added functionality in IE4, IE5 and IE6 that were knowingly non-standard, in some cases trying to tie them to IIS web server, specifically to try to devalue the idea that people could use any web browser and any web server they want. ActiveX was in a similar vein -- in addition to all the other bad stuff that can be said about ActiveX, the worst is it was even intentionally and gratuitously incompatible with the NPAPI (Netscape Plugin API) that every other browser was already using. (Most of these tie-ins turned out to be horribly insecure and were removed from both IIS and IE later on.) And now, those who "drank the coolaid" and made IE6 ActiveX "web apps" are deservedly paying for it -- seriously, people did warn them over and over and over at the time that these were not web apps and it was bad to design things like this.
IE6 is dead, Long live Safari. Or Firefox. Or Chrome. Or Opera. Or any of the alternative web browsers, which are all by design better than IE will ever be.
If only Microsoft had come through on their intention to stop developing IE altogether, the web would be a much better place. I look forward to the funeral of IE as a product, not just a single version.
Self-styled 'web developers' need to climb down from their ivory tower and visit the real world. If your job is too difficult then you have the same choice us proper software developers have:Get better at it or do something else. Lots of people are doing work that is difficult or irritating. That's why we get paid - it's compensation for putting up with the shit.
IE6 is clearly not useless. The fact it is still here (and apparently the second most used browser, shockingly) shows that it is still useful. That doesn't mean that it /ought/ to be or that it's a good thing but you can't just ignore that fact. If IE6 was as bad as some people are claiming it would never have been a success and would be long gone.
There are many reasons why IE6 is still around and those of you whining about the pain of writing for it need to accept the part you have played in that. My company is using apps that won't work in anything else and that's because *you or your colleagues* can't be arsed to update them and/or are overcharging for the privilege.
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